June 22, 2018
Team Melli won its first match of the World Cup finals by a score of 1-0 over Morocco—but only in the last minute of the game and only on an own-goal by a Moroccan player.
Team Melli looked flat during most of the game. It only held possession of the ball 32 percent of the time and it only made two shots on goal during the entire match—although Morocco only made three shots on goal.
While only one Moroccan received a yellow card, three of Iran’s players were carded—Masud Shojai, Karim Ansarifard and Ali-Reza Jahanbakhsh—all of them key players for the team.
Oddly, Coach Carlos Queiroz did not play two other major players—Ashkan Dejagah and Reza Ghoochan-nejad—who spent the entire game on the bench.
Queiroz pursued a very conservative strategy—emphasizing the strong defense he has long taught the team to master, and generally only going on offense when there was a breakaway opportunity.
But this was a game Iran had to win. With the other two teams in the Iran-Morocco group being Spain and Portugal, who are both ranked among the world’s top 10 teams, the loser of the Iran-Morocco match for all practical purposes would be eliminated. What’s more, when Spain and Portugal played to a 3-3 tie, that meant Iran went to the top of the group standings with three points versus one point each for Spain and Portugal and none for Morocco.
The need to win—and hopefully pick up a lot of goals as goal differential might decide who finished in the top two—suggested that Queiroz would try a more offensive game. But he did not. However, in injury time at the end of the game, when it was a scoreless tie, Queiroz did send his troops on the attack. And that proved the right decision.
With one minute left in injury time, Morocco committed a foul, giving Iran a free kick. Ehsan Haji-Safi lofted the ball to come down right in front of the Moroccan goal. But there was no Iranian striker there. Instead, it was Moroccan defender Aziz Bouhaddouz who lunged at the ball with his head—and batted it right into his own goal net.
He collapsed and buried his head in his hands. His teammates tried to console him.
It was only Iran’s second win in 13 matches at four World Cup finals. The first was the 1998 2-1 victory over the United States.
Iran’s players threw Coach Carlos Queiroz into the air after the final whistle. They hugged and danced, savoring the best moment of their careers. Back in Iran, people poured into the streets in celebration.
Moroccan coach Herve Renard said his team ”fell into the trap” set by Iran, which sat back and relied on the defensive strength that carried the team through the last Asian qualifying round by conceding only two goals in 10 games—and those two goals only came in the very last match of the qualifiers after Iran had already qualified.
